If you want to triple your revenue and double your profits, the single most important thing you can focus on is hiring the right people for your business. That's not a motivational platitude — it's the exact lesson entrepreneur Leila Hormozi learned building and selling three businesses before the age of 28, leading to a $100 million net worth. The framework she used across all three? Three simple principles she calls the 3 C's: Character, Competence, and Commitment. Get all three right, and you build a team that drives your business forward. Miss even one, and you'll find yourself in the most painful experience any business owner can face — letting people go.
How Do You Hire the Right People for Your Business?
The core answer is deceptively simple: stop hiring based on resumes and gut feelings. Instead, run every candidate through a structured three-part filter. Each of the 3 C's must be deliberately assessed — not assumed. Most business owners get burned because they're impressed in the interview room and skip the hard diagnostic work. Here's how to do it right.
How Do You Test for Values in a Job Interview?
The first C is Character — specifically, whether a candidate's character aligns with your company's values. This is where most hiring goes wrong. It's not enough for someone to have great character in general; they need to share your values in particular.
The key insight here is that behavior is the proxy for values. Anyone can say they value honesty, grit, or competitive greatness in an interview. What matters is whether they can demonstrate it through past actions. Leila calls this approach operationalizing your values.
Here's how to do it: write down your company's core values, then design interview questions that ask candidates to reference specific past experiences that prove they've lived those values. This is called a reference question — you're asking them to recall and describe real behavior, not describe an ideal version of themselves.
What Interview Questions Reveal Your Best Candidates?
For the value of competitive greatness, try these:
- "Can you tell me about a time you achieved a really challenging goal?" — You're not just looking for business wins. A pro athlete, a musician who mastered their craft, someone who hit a personal milestone — these all count. The goal is to find intrinsic motivation.
- "What is your career goal?" — Someone who says "I don't really know, I just go where I'm needed" is telling you they have low competitive greatness. You want someone who is stubborn about their growth.
- "What's your proudest career moment?" — Listen for answers involving deep challenge, going above and beyond, or building character. You want people who are excellent for themselves — not just for the paycheck.
For a value like honesty, ask: "Tell me about a time you had to say something honest that hurt someone's feelings, but you knew it was the right thing to do." The specificity of their answer tells you everything. Vague, roundabout responses are a red flag. Rich, detailed stories are a green light.
One more critical point: the interview is the best version of this person you will ever see. If they raise concerns during the interview, those concerns will only grow once they're on your team. Take those signals seriously.
Why Hiring for Experience Instead of Skills Costs You
The second C is Competence — and this is where even savvy business owners make expensive mistakes. The trap is treating experience as a substitute for skill. It isn't.
Leila learned this the hard way when hiring a CTO for her software company. She was dazzled by a resume that included stints at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. She didn't press on actual skills. She assumed the experience spoke for itself. That hire cost her $300,000 — in recruiting fees, severance, and lost momentum — when the person turned out to lack the exact skills the role required.
Experience is only a proxy to skill. It is not a replacement for it.
Consider this: could someone who worked as a concierge at a luxury hotel be a better executive assistant than someone who's held the EA title for a decade? Absolutely — because the skills they've built (anticipating needs, managing complexity, staying calm under pressure) transfer directly. Hospitality workers, in particular, tend to make exceptional EAs, customer support leads, and operations managers for exactly this reason.
How Do You Actually Test Competency When Hiring?
The answer is competency testing — and it's easier than ever. Use AI tools like ChatGPT to break a role down into its five core functions, then design an assessment or situational reference question for each one.
For example, if you're hiring a head of customer support, the five core functions might be:
- Managing emotionally charged customers
- Building and maintaining a customer inquiry archive
- Managing and developing a support team
- Communicating with internal stakeholders
- Expanding the company's knowledge base platform
For each function, either have them complete a practical test or ask a situational reference question: "Tell me specifically about a time at your last job where you built out a knowledge base. Walk me through exactly how you did it."
Here's the tell: if someone can't tell you a clear, detailed story about something they claim to have done, they probably didn't do it. Watch for candidates who take five minutes to answer a simple question, padding their response with irrelevant accomplishments to avoid admitting they lack the experience. One candidate took seven minutes to answer how large a team they'd managed — because the real answer was "technically zero."
You can also run live simulations. For a customer support role, say: "I'm going to pretend to be an angry customer. Talk to me the way you would handle that call." You'll quickly discover whether their skills are real or performed.
How Can You Tell If a Candidate Is Truly Committed?
The third C is Commitment — and it's the one most often overlooked. Skill without commitment is untapped potential. You can have the most talented, values-aligned person in the world on your team and still fail if they're not fully dedicated to the role.
Commitment means purposely restricting other freedoms to honor one thing. In a job context, that means saying no to side projects, divided attention, and half-measures in order to give everything to this role.
This becomes especially relevant today, when side hustles and entrepreneurial ventures are everywhere. Leila has hired people who claimed they'd shelved their own businesses to focus on her company — only to discover six months later that they were still running those businesses on the side. The job suffered. No one could reach them. Transparency evaporated. The role quietly collapsed.
Two questions to ask yourself when evaluating commitment:
- What season of life is this person in? Most intensive labor is done by people in their 20s and 30s. Someone who's been through a high-output season once may want to feel that energy again without actually wanting the sacrifice that comes with it. Know the difference.
- What did they give up to take this job? This is the clearest signal. Companies that use stock purchase plans or equity vesting aren't just being generous — they're creating a financial stake that filters for commitment. Studies show executives who buy into a company with their own money stay longer, perform better, and are more committed. Skin in the game works.
True commitment, as Leila puts it, is acting as if alternatives do not exist. It's not a statement someone makes in an interview. It's a process you can observe — and a pattern you can screen for.
How to Build a Simple Hiring Framework That Works
Here's the complete 3C hiring framework distilled into action steps:
- Character: Write down your company values. Design reference questions that ask candidates to prove they've demonstrated those values through past behavior. Look for specificity, detail, and consistency across answers.
- Competence: Identify the five core functions of the role. Create a competency test or situational reference question for each. Never let an impressive resume replace an actual skills assessment.
- Commitment: Understand what level of dedication the role requires. Assess what the candidate is willing to give up to take it. Use financial alignment tools like equity or stock purchases where appropriate to filter for true commitment.
The painful truth about bad hires is that most of them were preventable. The signals were there — in the interview, in the vague answers, in the impressive-but-hollow resume. The 3C framework exists to make sure you never miss those signals again. Build the right team, and everything else in your business gets easier.
